That 'Better Than Red Wedding' HotD Scene Ended Up Being a Huge Flop
The first House of the Dragon S2 episode didn’t hit the unhinged spot for many fans.
Disclaimer: This article contains heavy spoilers for House of the Dragon S2E1.
House of the Dragon Season 2 kicked off with the original book’s most notorious scene fans have been eagerly awaiting. Blood and Cheese, two hired assassins, were sent to kill Queen Helaena’s son: they made her choose the victim and then killed the other one than she’d chosen. Beheaded poor boy Jaehaerys right in front of his mother. Sounds properly unhinged, right? But the show didn’t, well, show it.
Blood and Cheese Disappointed HotD Fans
Book fans knew this scene was coming, and they have spent the last year or so promising the HotD fan community “a new Red Wedding,” rivaling Game of Thrones ’ most notorious scene’s brutality. When it turned out that House of the Dragon opted out of showing the massacre on the screen, they felt almost betrayed.
“Blood & Cheese was a chop. This is what they were comparing to the Red Wedding?” one user asked on their X page.
People in the comments got divided into two groups. Those supporting the claim that HotD fumbled the Blood and Cheese scene are pretty much exclusively book fans: they are properly mad at the showrunners for not following George Martin ’s outline closely, even reposting the original text for TV show fans to read and compare.
Not All HotD Fans Are As Bloodthirsty
But while books fans are out there frustrated with the iconic scene’s execution, show fans claim quite the opposite. Many of them point out that the Blood and Cheese’s entry was dark and brutal enough for their taste, and many of them started questioning the book fans’ sanity with them wanting to see a literal child murder.
“I don’t know why you’d expect to see in full a little boy getting his head chopped off on cable TV… I think they did it perfectly: we heard it happening off screen as Helaena escaped which was equally as disturbing,” user ZestyWrap wrote.
All in all, we’d say that House of the Dragon’s Blood and Cheese scene is much closer to Shireen’s execution than to the Red Wedding… And, while we’re at it, now would be the perfect time to remind book fans that the HotD showrunners specifically avoided comparisons to the Red Wedding. It was fans who compared them.